1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an image forming apparatus capable of controlling the number of jobs that can be executed simultaneously. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an image forming apparatus such as a typical copier or a printer, efficiency and smoothness of output processing are achieved by temporarily spooling image data on a scanned original, received print data, or the like in a memory and sequentially performing outputs thereof in executing jobs.
For this reason, in an attempt to simultaneously process a large number of jobs, a delay or an interruption may occur due to excess of a memory capacity. In such a case, an upper limit value (number limit) of the number of simultaneously-executed jobs is defined in advance to restrict execution of the job if the upper limit value is reached.
The number of simultaneously-executable jobs may be controlled based on a priority.
According to this control, the upper limit value of the number of simultaneously-executed jobs is dynamically changed depending on an urgency degree or a requester of the job or depending on an operating ratio of a CPU.
This involves troublesome processing for setting the priority on a job-to-job basis and determining a priority order of the respective jobs.